One Week Past Linux 4.18.0, The Linux 4.18.3 Kernel Is Already Out

Greg Kroah-Hartman had a fun Friday night issuing new point releases to the Linux 3.18 / 4.4 / 4.9 / 4.14 / 4.17 / 4.18 kernels only to have to issue new point releases minutes later.

It was just on Thursday that Linux 4.18.1 was released along with updates to older stable branches for bringing L1TF / Foreshadow mitigation. Friday night then brought Linux 4.18.2, Linux 4.17.16, Linux 4.14.64, Linux 4.9.121, Linux 4.4.149, and Linux 3.18.119 with more patches. Those kernels brought various fixes, including in the x86 PTI code for clearing the global bit more aggressively, crypto fixes, and other maintenance work.

But Greg happened to leave out the latest L1TF / Foreshadow mitigation patch of exempting zeroed PTEs from the inversion change. Due to leaving that out, he ended up re-spinning all of the Linux 4.x kernel point releases. That latest L1TF patch was in Linux 4.19 Git since yesterday.

So if you maintain your own kernel(s), this weekend there is the fun of upgrading to the Linux 4.4.150, 4.9.122, 4.14.65, 4.17.17, and 4.18.3 kernels. As always the latest Linux kernel sources can be fetched from Kernel.org.